Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Control Engineering

Abstract

The fundamental concept underlying the theory and practice of control engineering is negative feedback (normally simply referred to as feedback). Feedback is the use of a measurement of some aspect of system behavior to correct or adjust that behavior. Artefacts exhibiting deliberate use of feedback have been extant for over two thousand years, but the English word “feedback” dates from 1920 when it was used to describe parasitic connections in a wireless amplifier which resulted in local oscillations’.